Getting a decent quote from Jet Black and Dave Schram is harder than completing the busking challenge on The Amazing Race Canada.

And if you believe that, I’ve got a tractor-trailer full of lentils to sell you. (Hidden stuffies included!)

The BFFS, strong favourites to win the reality-TV competition, were eliminated this week, after Schram didn’t pull in the dollar bills busking on the streets of St. John’s, Nfld.

“I didn’t think it was a joke, cheer challenge. They had seven instruments that we could take and I thought that was the challenge,” the 28-year-old says during a conference call on Tuesday. (Schram is a former national cheerleading champ.) “Looking back on it, is there stuff I could have done differently? Yeah, but I definitely didn’t realize it at the time.”

Dave Schram busks on the streets of St. John’s, Nfld. on The Amazing Race Canada.

The always-on duo is working on getting over their elimination. After all, they lost out on the grand prize of $250,000, two Corvettes and a year’s worth of executive first-class travel on Air Canada. Hardly chump change, and they had a one-in-four chance of taking it home. It helps that people have reacted to them so positively, they say, and they know why. (Humble-brag without the humble coming right up.)

“After seeing the show, we are the most entertaining. Definitely, we had the most fun,” Schram says. “Even when the chips were down, we still kept it together and never turned on each other.”

“How can you not love us?” Black adds (laughingly, it should be noted).

And that sense of fun — or rather FUN, if I’m going to try to capture ‘The Dudes’ outsized personalities – is what they’re taking from their time on the race. No life-changing epiphanies, no promises to be better men, no new life goals, just memories of the awesome time they shared.

“We are who we are both outside the race and inside the race,” says Black, a police officer in London, Ont. “What you see is what you get. It didn’t really change us.”

The pair knows that their time on the series, which had them racing across Canada from coast to coast to coast, was an opportunity of a lifetime and they’re grateful for it. But it wasn’t all shots of screech and kissing cod.

“Something the home audience doesn’t realize is the lack of sleep and regular food intake,” says Black. “That was probably the hardest thing I had to adapt to. For example, leaving Iqaluit, we had to take three flights to get back. Hal and Jo had to take four to get to Regina. So even before we were digging into the lentil bins, we had been up for 24 hours and we hadn’t eaten anything aside from airport food. So that was probably a factor in some meltdowns.”

Jet Black kisses the wrong end of the cod while being screeched in in Newfoundland on The Amazing Race Canada.

Black, a two-time national fitness model champion with the ginormous muscles to prove it, estimates that half his backpack was stuffed with food, protein powder and weight-gainer. And his four-to-five time a week gym routine was cut down to three or four sessions in hotel gyms.

“But fret not! I’ve put the weight back on. I don’t’ want anyone to panic. You should see how tight my jeans are now.”

That physicality didn’t save them in the end, though. “Pipsqueak” (Black’s description, not mine) sisters Vanessa Morgan and Celina Mziray vaulted into second place on this week’s leg of the race. The sisters are chronically at the back of the pack.

“I became really good friends with them. I was the only person who thought they earned a spot (in the finals),” Schram says. “It’s easier for people to dismiss them than to give them the credit I think they deserve . . .It’s not about being first, it’s about not being last. And they did that. They beat us on that day, which sucks for us, but I wish them well.”

Watching the episodes, rather than running the race beside the sisters, has given Black a new appreciation for how hard the siblings pushed themselves.

“In Iqaluit, when they were physically spent, they kept pushing forward . . . that did impress me.”

There are also no hard feelings for Mziray’s busking “performance” of hula hooping in yoga pants and a tight T-shirt. “I would have sold my first-born child for a $20 bill at that time,” Schram says. “She was a hot little tamale, so she got money.”

And just because their time on their time on The Amazing Race Canada has come to an end, don’t be surprised if you see the pair back on the small screen in the future.

“We are currently in talks with all of the major networks. They are all wooing us,” Schram says.

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